In Episode #9, Wilco talks about Facebook ads, listen as he shares his knowledge on what to do if your Ad campaign is not working.
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Hey there it's me, Wilco de Kreij here and welcome back to today's episode. I'm actually really excited because, I don't know. I'm just in this zone right now. I'm just in this flow where I'm super productive and a lot of things are moving forward and I'm just overall excited.
Just this morning I actually just recorded various videos which we'll be using as Facebook video ads because as you may or may not know, Facebook video ads are right now probably the cheapest way to advertise on Facebook. At least that's what my experience is. Plus, it's not just cheap but it's also really good way to communicate with your audience, right? You actually can be more persuasive than with just a written text, for example. Yeah, really like video ads.
I figured today we're going to talk about Facebook ads because I know a lot of you are doing Facebook ads or you are planning on doing it. If you're not planning on doing it then you're actually shoot because it's actually a major, major opportunity. Obviously, because we have a platform that is specifically targeted at Facebook advertisers, which you'll be able to find at connectio.io, we have various tools all specifically targeted at Facebook advertisements to make your life easier and your ads more effective basically.
One of the questions we get a lot; obviously, is people asking us, "Hey, this campaign is not working. What's wrong with it? What do I do wrong?" Obviously, when you're targeting on Facebook or when you're advertising on Facebook you need to consider a lot of things. I mean you need to target a specific group, you need to write the right copy. There's a lot of things you could do wrong as well. I mean if you target the wrong kind of people, if you write the wrong message, if you have the wrong image, if you have ... there's all this stuff you have to do right and if you don't do it right your ads may not confer and it may not be working, right?
For a long time, actually, I thought that was always the main issue, but actually I don't think. The thing, the number one thing that I see people doing wrong with their Facebook ads isn't actually even remotely closely related to their Facebook ads. In order to explain that need to go back a little bit first. If you've been following me for a while then you may know that when we launched a new product we always do the three-part video sequence. Well, not always but usually we do a three-part video sequence where we drip out three different types of content videos and this is all inspired by Jeff Walker in his launch formula sequence.
What we do is we drip out three different videos and they all educate people and they all educate or market about what's coming in a way that they actually appreciate the value. After those three days, after those three videos, sorry, well then release the product into the market. By that time people will have signed up to our email list in order to see those three videos and have consumed these three videos and then when we present them with the actual offer it's going to be a no-brainer for them.
The way we usually promote this is using our own email list as well as affiliates. Affiliates also send traffic over to these pre-launched video sequences. It works really, really well. A couple months ago I figured, you know what? We're already doing quite a bit of Facebook advertising and retargeting all of that but I figured what I'm going to send people into this three-part video sequence on a more evergreen basis. Let me explain that.
What we did was we had those three different videos. What we had was an opt-in page, people could actually sign up or we actually said, "Hey, you can sign up. We'll send you this free, awesome information," and as soon as they signed up they would be able to watch video #1. Then the next day or the day after, depending on how fast actually if they read the emails or not, but let's say they just read all the emails then the next day they would actually get video #2 which is once again more content. The next day they would get video #3 which is even more content and then the day after they would actually get an offer saying, "Hey, you can buy this." That's what we had set up.
We started driving Facebook ads traffic to that. That means people see a Facebook ad on their timeline, which is obviously mentions the free information that we're going to give them and they sign up. They enter the email address and then they go through that sequence. When we started driving Facebook ads to that it was not even remotely profitable. We were spending a lot more money than we actually got back from it. We started to tweak a lot of things. We started to tweak the audience. We started targeting a more specific audience. We started to split test all the images. We started to split test all of the copy. We started doing a lot of testing. Everything we tested was inside Facebook ads platform, right? Changing the ad types, just a link ad or a video ad and all these kind of things.
In the end, we actually got it profitable but just somewhat profitable, basically, which is a bad thing because usually when you have a really specific audience on Facebook and you're able to just make it barely profitable then it's going to be really hard to really scale that up to a wider audience because as soon as you go after a wider audience your conversions will drop and usually you'll have to spend more on every customer. Even on a very specific audience you're having a hard time making a profit. Then it's going to be even harder making a profit on a wide audience.
Looking back, at some point I realized this feels like an uphill battle and when I started analyzing what other people were doing who were in the same market, none of them were actually promoting a three-part video sequence. I thought maybe that's the issue. Maybe that's the problem that we have here. Because let's be honest, with Facebook ads you're sort of doing interruption marketing. It's sort of like, for example, if you advertise on Google where people search for your certain keyword, they're actually looking to go on a holiday to turkey, or whatever. Then you present it with an ad that you have you can book a holiday to Turkey at your website. That's like pool marketing. People are already searching for it and you just give them what they're looking for.
On Facebook, they're not looking for the thing that you got to offer. You're really interrupting them. What my ad was doing was it interrupted them and it got them to enter their email address. That's like a micro commitment, right? It's easy to do but the problem is that I've been looking at the numbers and everybody who signed up immediately went to video #1. Then the number of people that actually watched video #2 a few days later or one or two days later was actually already considerably lower. Then the third video was even lower than that and then only a small group of people actually got to even see the offer.
Well, maybe all of these people would have been interested in the actual offer but because I dragged it on for a couple of days it just didn't work. I just got a small group of people and obviously some of those people still purchased, right? The problem is that in order to be effective on Facebook, you shouldn't just get some people to buy your stuff. You basically need to make sure that you are converting better than anyone else. I mean if you are converting better than any of your competitors that's when you can just outbid them. That's when you don't mind if you spend a bit more money on your ads because you know you're still going to make money on your bottom line.
When I realized that I figured you know what, scratch that. We're going to start over. At that point, I started building a new funnel for the exact same product, exact same offer. We started running a webinar. We drove people into an opt-in form once again. This time instead of going into a three-part video sequence we invited them to a webinar. That actually made a huge difference. I mean right from the bat when we implemented that even though I'm not very good at webinars yet, we're still learning as we go.
Right from the bat it was profitable and this was without any split testing. Just to go back, initially we did a lot of split testing on this three-part video sequence trying to get it to convert. Eventually we actually got it to convert. Then I tried a new kind of funnel and with the first attempt it immediately was profitable and from that point onwards we could just scale up and optimize from there.
That's really the one thing that I see going wrong with people as well. People they always look at their Facebook campaign like, "What is wrong with my Facebook campaign?" Well the problem usually is that they're funneled. That their website is not converting the way it should be. I mean if you're not converting as well as your competitors then no matter what you do they're going to win. They're going to be able to spend more on Facebook ads. They're going to be able to overbid you. You're going to either left with a loss. You're not going to be able to make a profit or you're just you're not able to scale up your ads. You're going to spend a couple of dollars a day, for example, and you'll be able to have it profitable like that but there's no way you could ever scale up to, for example, $500 a day for example. In order to be at that level or even higher, you need to be have a good enough margin and a good enough conversion that you're able to do that.
That's really, I think, the one thing that I wanted to share with all of you that if you are running Facebook ads and you're having a hard time or you're not really sure. You're not making money or you're not able to scale up high enough, instead of just focusing on your actual Facebook campaign, instead of just focusing on your actual Facebook ads and what targeting you have, start looking at your actual funnel. Could you ... Is there something you could do to boost your conversions?
Don't think of, "Oh, yeah. I'm going to change the colors of my buttons," or anything like that because that's just marginal difference. Well, what kind of a big shift could you do, even if it means that you have to delete your whole funnel and just start over just like I did. I mean it's not always easy. I put a lot of time and effort into it. I just deleted it like boom, gone. Start over. It's worth it if it's going to give you big results.
Don't be scared to make big changes, but really ask yourself what could we do? Maybe you already have a good product and maybe it's somewhat converted. Maybe you don't have, for example, an extra offer on the back end, an up sale, for example. Maybe that could be the one thing missing that will add extra profit to your business so you can actually you're able to afford more on the front then on your actual Facebook ads.
I hope we didn't confuse too many of you. I know this is just I just hit record basically during my lunch break so I can just talk to all of you and share some knowledge and share some information with all of you. I really hope that this helps you and I'd actually love to hear your feedback as well so hit me up by email. You'll probably know where to find me. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to talk to you all in the next episode. Peace out, everyone. Cheers. Bye-bye.
“Don't be scared to make big changes.”
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